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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Today I met with a multi-disciplinary group at BIDMC that is rethinking traditional academic medical center office space and is planning the office space of the future with innovations such as shared open floor plan workspaces, "huddle rooms" for ad hoc meetings, shared IT infrastructure, easy to use wall mounted displays, electronic conference room availability indicators, and ubiquitous use of scanners to eliminate paper.

Like many academic medical centers, BIDMC has a high demand for closed door offices but has a limited supply of real estate. Most clinicians are in the their office less than 10% of the time, so conventional approaches to academic departmental space are very inefficient.

Today's meeting focused on work flow. How is clinical and administrative paperwork eliminated in a shared office space environment? Who does scanning/metadata tagging/quality control of scanned documents? What regulatory/compliance issues need to be addressed as paper filing cabinets are turned into electronic folder systems?

Clinical scanning is easy - we already have a comprehensive approach that uses high speed scanners, Captiva software, and an automated upload directly into our medical record.

Administrative scanning is harder - we have not implemented a document management system such as Documentum. I welcome advice from my readers - how you eliminated administrative paper storage with scanning? What are your retention and security policies? How do you query and retrieve selected documents?

Since there are no closed door offices in the new design, several small "huddle areas" enable ad hoc private meetings with automated electronic display of room availability and appropriate wall mounted LCDs supporting presentations from laptops and iPads.

Finally, since new data will be entered electronically and not on paper, we've deployed eScription voice recognition software in our data center. Clinicians can use a phone or an iPad/iPhone app to upload voice files for immediate voice recognition and insertion into our electronic record.

There will be many lessons learned from this office space of the future. Hopefully we'll offer a very attractive space with high productivity in a smaller real estate footprint that is used efficiently More to come as we go live.